Weber and Political Sociology

This chapter shows that Weber provides an existential account of political action that is then folded into his political sociology. This existential account does not merely rotate around the rationalization of all social action into routine forms of domination, as so many commentators have claimed, but constitutes a dialectical movement between competition, struggle and selection on the one hand and routine predictability on the other, the former leading to the latter and the latter creating new conditions for the former. This dialectic is operative in Weber's famous definition of power, his typology of legitimate of legitimate domination-rulership (legitime Herrschaft) and his application of these concepts to understanding the dynamics of modern politics as business and vocation. An unexpected outcome of reading Weber's political sociology in this way is that his view of direct democracy converges, though quite unintentionally, with those democratic theorists and political sociologists who argue that genuine democracy always appears in resistance to domination.